on the lexicographic treatment of polysemous verbs...

ON THE LEXICOGRAPHIC TREATMENT OF

POLYSEMOUS VERBS IN GREEK-ENGLISH ELECTRONIC

DICTIONARIES: THE CASE OF [AN’ O]

MARY MARIN (University of Athens)

ABSTRACT: This paper presents the results of a study whose main objective was to

suggest specifications for the creation of a bilingual electronic dictionary for High-

-School Greek-speaking learners of English that will cater for production needs.

More specifically, it discusses the issue of how certain verbs, especially troublesome

for high school Greek learners of English, have been dealt with in Greek-English

dictionaries. The extent to which four print dictionaries have succeeded in providing

and explaining English equivalents of selected verbs is investigated, and five elec-

tronic Greek-English dictionaries are evaluated while the microstructure of

[an’ o] (open, turn on, unfold, spread, dig up etc) is examined in detail in two on-

-line ones. Since different configurations are required for entries describing verbs,

these are illustrated first by pinpointing the weaknesses and omissions of existing

print and electronic dictionaries and finally by designing their microstructure for an

electronic bilingual dictionary targeted at Greek High School learners mainly for

productive use. Finally, the proposed verb entry is presented in detail.

KEYWORDS: learners’ dictionaries; print and electronic bilingual lexicography;

Corpus Linguistics; lexical databases, verb entry

1. Introduction

A dictionary is considered to be a main element towards producing and understanding a foreign language, in this case English. Electronic dictionar-ies are a way of encoding all relevant information associated with lexical entries in a manner easily accessible to users. The various types of electronic bilingual dictionaries in the context of English as a foreign language have been examined in the literature, and researchers agree that not a single bilin-gual dictionary meets 100% of students needs (Cowie, 2000; Koren, 1997; Loucky, 2003; Nielsen and Tarp, 2009; Thompson, 1987; Tono, 1989). The

Estudos Linguísticos/Linguistic Studies, 6-7, Edições Colibri/CLUNL, Lisboa, 2012, pp. 245-263

246 Mary Marin

present work examines some of the issues which are relevant to the construc-tion of a bilingual electronic Greek-English dictionary, aiming to cover the encoding needs of young learners in the target group.

More precisely, the main objective is to suggest specifications for the creation of a bilingual electronic dictionary for high school Greek-speaking learners of English that will cater for the production needs of the specific target group. This can be accomplished by identifying the problems encoun-tered by students of elementary to advanced level of competence in English, compiling comprehensive bilingual databases through research in English and Greek corpora, incorporating all relevant information about grammatical and contextual difficulties, and by selecting examples as revealing as possi-ble for Greek speakers. The verb [an’ o] has been selected to illus-trate this attempt. The entry developed aims at configuring a way to encode all the data in a manner appropriate to users of this age.

2. Literature Review

2.1. Electronic dictionaries

It is an undeniable fact that computer technology has had immense im-pact on the design and use of a range of dictionaries for language learners. An increasing number of language learners find an electronic dictionary preferable to a printed one because users want their dictionaries to be cheap, complete, portable, comprehensible and easy to use and electronic dictionar-ies have the advantage of providing their users with almost instant access to a database much larger than a single book. (Nesi, 1999; Chen, 2010). Never-theless, Rogers (1996: 84) points out that electronic replications of paper--based publications are still “word-based rather than meaning-based” even though they offer better search and retrieval facilities.1

Electronic dictionaries can be stored and accessed in a number of dif-ferent ways. For instance, they can be built or inserted into a hand-held de-vice. A survey by Taylor and Chan (1994) revealed that despite the way that they are marketed as commodities, hand-held electronic dictionaries are regarded by their owners as serious learning tools, not just as toys or status symbols. Yet, although look-up is faster, the quality of the information they contain can only be as good as that of the original dictionaries on which they are based, and thus it is inevitable that some will suffer from defects associ-ated with the smaller hard-copy bilingual dictionaries, such as inadequate

1 She proposes a semantically organized dictionary which would take the user from the defi-

nition to the word, and which would deal with such queries as “find me the name of the thing which is a kind of boat and which is flat-bottomed and travels on canals and rivers”. Search facilities of this kind are in fact already provided by learners’ dictionaries on CD-

-ROM, although many users are probably unaware of their existence.

On the lexicographic treatment of polysemous verbs 247

coverage, insufficient grammatical, collocational and pragmatic information, and over-simplistic translation.

Alternatively, learners’ dictionaries on floppy disk or CD-ROM also pro-vide more grammar and usage information than hard-copy or hand-held elec-tronic products, because there is space to include grammar and usage vol-umes in the database. In addition to visual elements that can be accessed directly from their own menus, or by cross-referencing from the dictionary entry, they may also contain audio libraries which provide the user with the option to hear the spoken form of any headword in the dictionary. Moreover, dictionaries on disk allow a certain amount of ‘fuzzy’ searching which al-lows the user to locate every occurrence of a word or combination of words within the dictionary, thus retrieving multi-word units, collocations, and groups of similarly-worded definitions.2

Currently, the best electronic dictionaries for language learners seem to be those published on websites, which offer storage devices, and retrieval systems; their immense capacity and easy links to other computer-based applications make them a useful learning tool for foreign language students and teachers.

Since the medium in which bilingual dictionaries are presented is one of the elements that determine the selection, organization and representation of information in them, Christina Gelpi (2004) believes that on-line dictionar-ies have to be treated as specific products and goes on to investigate their quality parameters. Among their positive aspects she mentions the easy, quick and cheap access to lexicographical online information, the greater amount of online dictionaries available than printed ones on a diversity of subjects, the simplicity of search systems most on-line dictionaries offer, as well as the introduction of image, sound and video in dictionary entries al-lowed by multimedia resources. Most importantly, the absence of space re-strictions allows the lack of homogeneity and compression that exists in printed dictionaries. Unfortunately, as Gelpi (2004: 10) stresses, “not all on--line bilingual dictionaries are really designed as on-line products. Most of them are digitized products, or just transformed Word documents, without any consideration for digital resources and possibilities”.

2.2. The pedagogical value of electronic learners’ dictionaries

The pedagogic dictionary has recently been more widely used as an educational aid and a learning tool. Nevertheless, Brumfit (1985) claims that quite often the dictionary is taken for granted and under-utilized. In a recent

2 Unfortunately, searches of the A-Z dictionary often extract entries that are not linked by

meaning; the same words are repeated many times within the full text, and a combination of search terms will often co-occur within the same entry, not in collocation, but in totally un-connected example sentences.

248 Mary Marin

study on dictionary reference skills in higher education, Nesi comes to a similar conclusion: most foreign language students at British universities have no dictionary skills and “don’t in general ever use monolingual diction-aries. They use bilingual ones badly” (1999: 65). This is even truer for elec-tronic dictionaries which have only been available for a few years and whose use has been investigated in only a few research studies so far (Guillot & Kenning, 1994; Sharpe, 1995; Nesi, 2000).

Although the comments of hand-held dictionary owners suggest that learners appreciate the speed and ease of electronic lookup, it is not known whether fast searching is really advantageous to the learning process. Ac-cording to Sharpe (1995: 50) some teachers of Japanese have expressed fears that learners will not retain the information they retrieve so quickly and so painlessly. In support of the pedagogical value of electronic dictionary use, however, Guillot and Kenning (1994) write of their students’ “increased capacity for sustained effort” when using the Robert Electronique3. They found that the accessibility of computer-based dictionary entries encouraged browsing, and hence vocabulary acquisition: students spontaneously looked up a large number of unknown or unclear words, not just in cases where the task made it necessary, but also simply out of curiosity, they subsequently commented on how easy and satisfying it was to do so, and added that they would never have done it to anything like the same extent with a printed dictionary, if at all (Guillot and Kenning, 1994: 65).

The pedagogical potential of electronic dictionaries is too great to be ignored, even by institutions with few resources. A single CD-ROM on a single computer can provide a huge amount of classroom material, while the provision of dictionaries on the Internet may in time make it unnecessary to install local area networks, or trust CD-ROM disks to individual learners. A number of on-line dictionaries are already available on the World Wide Web4. Meijs (1992: 152) foretells “the imminent demise of the dictionary as a book. In a decade or so, on-line dictionaries on disk or CD-ROM will no doubt be the norm rather than the exception”. Many readers will doubt the veracity of this prediction, yet the present pace of technological change is

3 In 2002 Dictionnaires Le Robert produced a new bilingual dictionary designed for pre-

-intermediate learners of English, the Junior Bilingue (since renamed First in English). Unlike most standard bilingual dictionaries available in France, it is asymmetrical (the “en-coding” and “decoding” sides are presented in different ways) and designed specifically for French people learning English (i.e., all the metalanguage is in French and the text is built around known problems encountered by learners).

4 For an Index of On-line Dictionaries, see: http://www.yourdictionary.com or http://www.onelook.com for English MLD, while http://www.bucknell.edu/”rbeard/ diction.html refers the user to more than 2,000 dictionaries in more than 260 languages and more than 150 specialized fields. In addition, http://www.lexicool.com is a directory of “all” the online bilingual and multilingual dictionaries and glossaries freely available on the Internet.


bewilderingly fast, and electronic learners’ dictionaries seem already to be on the way to becoming a preferred alternative to the ‘fat’ dictionary in print.

3. Research Methodology

The methodological procedure comprised both qualitative and quantita-tive criteria: qualitative, in that it included an investigation into the needs and pre-existing skills of the target group, as well as the content and struc-ture of the lemmas as presented in print and electronic bilingual dictionaries, but also quantitative for it not only took into account the frequency of verbs used in Greek and EFL educational material and the nature of errors made by students in EFL exams but also made use of the corpora to provide frequen-cies and enhance senses and examples.

3.1. Target User Specifications

In order to enhance the quality of a dictionary, it is necessary to take the target users’ needs and reference skills into account. For the purposes of this study, a representative sample of 388 high school students of various levels (elementary to advanced) were tested in relation to some of the most trouble-some and frequently tested verbs in EFL exams. In order to ensure represen-tativeness, significant effort was made to use a balanced body of students in terms of level which was determined according to the coursebook they were taught in their English class. Figure 1 shows the distribution of levels of competence of the participants in the written test.

Apart from free production (essays produced in the classroom environ-ment), guided and controlled activities were also evaluated: translation, mul-tiple choice and gap-filling exercises during which students were encouraged to use electronic dictionaries. The time allocated for the completion of the test was 15-20 minutes according to the level, which was viewed as adequate considering the length of the test and the amount of structures that learners were asked to produce.

False-beginners (7%) and elementary level (11%) students produced rather poor results especially in reference to morphology (inflection of verbs), grammar (tenses) and syntax (structure and prepositions). The major-ity of intermediate (17%) and upper-intermediate (24%) students produced fairly competent responses, particularly with regard to tenses and recognition of fixed expressions or idioms. As far as translation was concerned, word order issues were evident, as many students failed to follow the rules of Eng-lish syntax, and kept the order of the Greek words, as they found them in the source text.

250 Mary Marin

Figure 1: Level of competency of test participants

The verb [an’ o] presented more problems among lower levels.

With the exception of « », which was successfully translated as “dig (up) a hole”, only 25% of elementary and pre-intermediate students could distinguish among “set up” and “open up”. Although the percentage of finding the right translational equivalent increased as the level got higher (40% among intermediate and upper-intermediate and 83% among advanced level students), equivalents such as “undo (the zipper)” «

» and “unfold (the map)” « » were unknown even to higher levels. One would expect a certain ease at least in the recognition of “turn on the tap” for « » but even this one proved confus-ing. Equivalents such as “(the weather) clears up” and “(flowers) blossom” had been taught only to students sitting for exams, but once again the score was low (45%).

The evaluation of results combined with a comparison of the micro-structure of these verbs in monolingual and bilingual print and electronic dictionaries, revealed potential areas of improvement in the design of the dictionary entries mainly in terms of organization of the lemmas, enhance-ment of the definitions and enrichment of examples in order to maximize lexical coverage and grammatical information.

3.2. The verb entry in 4 print Greek-English Dictionaries

The microstructure of five polysemous verbs, (let/leave/allow etc), (open/turn on/unfold etc), (rob/steal etc), (throw, drop etc) and (hit/beat/knock etc) was examined in four print bilingual (Greek-English) learners’ dictionaries and evaluated in terms of their com-ponents. The dictionaries are: a) COLLINS – A. BETSIS ELT (2007)

b) OXFORD – D.N.STAVROPOULOS (2005) c) RIZOS – GREEK-ENGLISH DICTIONARY (2004)

advanced

5%

false-beginners

7%

elementary

11%

pre-

intermediate

15%

intermediate

17%

upper-

intermediate

24%

FCE holders

21%


d) JUNIOR FYTRAKIS (1998) targeted at school learners in the first years of English, which fits the profile of our target user to a great extent.

According to Back (2005), the dictionary entry designed for encoding purposes should provide all the metalinguistic information in the mother tongue, which is practised only by Collins and Fytrakis, since the metalan-guage in Oxford and Rizos is English.

1. None of the dictionaries under study includes phonetic transcription of the English equivalents, essential for EFL learners.

2. No inflected forms are given for the English verbs, not even the irregu-lar ones. Oxford-Stavropoulos, cross-refers the user to a list of tables of conjugation examples of Greek verbs at the back of the dictionary.

3. The only grammatical information provided is that of transitivity / in-transitivity given in abbreviated form, not in the mother tongue except in Collins. Junior Fytrakis does not provide any such information.

4. Unfortunately, in none of the entries under study is the grammatical or syntactical behaviour of the verbs explicitly or contextually indicated.

5. Typical collocations are given systematically in Collins (only in Greek) and in Oxford (in both languages) but these are very rarely contextual-ized.

6. In print dictionaries whole illustrative examples are rare, because of space constraints. Rizos gives partial sentences or edit corpus-based ex-amples. In Collins they are practically non-existent, whereas in Oxford--Stavropoulos, they are short and and do not provide enough context.

7. Finally, none of the dictionaries under study employ usage notes.

3.3. Performance evaluation of Greek-English electronic dictionaries

The bilingual dictionaries circulating in Greece belong to the Desk and Pocket categories, and in nine times out of ten, the second language is Eng-lish. Very few belong to the electronic type and of these some are available on purchase either with their print version or as stand-alone products or on--line. They are designed mainly for professionals and amateurs having basic needs for translations, but they hardly meet the users’ demands.5

The most popular electronic English-Greek & Greek-English dictionary in the market is MAGENTA6, which includes more than 370.000 words, phrases and idioms, including the great thesaurus of the Greek language with more than 90.000 synonyms. Both MAGENTA (hence referred to as MG) and its improved descendant GOLDEN VERSION (GV) are available on CD-ROM

but can also be accessed on line or downloaded. GV was selected for study

5 On account of the limited possibilities of the local market, “the writing of bilingual diction-

aries is done in a more or less haphazard way, […] and in most cases the result is the pro-duction of bilingual dictionaries that leave much to be desired”. (Tsampounaras, 2001).

6 MAGENTA on line: http://www.in.gr/DICTIONARY/lookup.asp?word

252 Mary Marin

not only because of the significant number of improvements since 1995, in the content as well as the interface, but also because it is an electronic ver-sion of the dictionary in print format. GEORGAKAS7 dictionary (GE) is only available on-line and although still incomplete, is the fullest of electronic products in terms of microstructure. YPROS (KY)8 is free on-line, while LINGVOSOFT (LS)9 is a commercial product typical of quick-access ‘self--proclaimed’ user-friendly products.

Three points of interest have been compared, regarding retrieval power, performance evaluation and user-friendliness. Firstly, strengths and weak-nesses in look-up routes are evaluated within each single dictionary plan and design frame.

Generally, in all five EDs under study, the search procedure is compara-tively very easy. If the learner needs to translate any word, he/she writes it down and the application will automatically recognize it as Greek or English giving as result the translations in the target language. On the left of the win-dow the words matching the given one are displayed and on the right, the translations are found. Nevertheless, GE does not recognize inflected forms or complex words, whereas LINGVOSOFT produces no results for (open, unfold, spread, switch on etc) alone. (Figure 2)

Figure 2: Search results for the entry (open to) in LINGVOSOFT

7 GEORGAKAS ON-LINE http://www.komvos.edu.gr/dictionaries/dictonline/DictOnLineGeo.

htm

8 KYPROS- http://www.kypros.org

9 LINGVOSOFT http://www.lingvosoft.com


KY and LS give the closest match instead. For example, when the user presses the past tense/anikse/, he/she gets a choice between: he opened the window and the homonym /aniksi/(spring)

Obviously, despite the ambitious search capabilities advertised by the publishers, one look at the microstructure of the headword in KYPROS-net reveals a great number of inefficiencies: among others, few equivalents, (only 10), cross-reference to other headwords, total lack of ex-ample sentences or grammatical and syntactic information. In addition, most products may allow the user to copy, but not print or export list of words corresponding to a search. All dictionaries but GE have a drop-down list. Only MG and GV offer phonetic transcription.

Most importantly, grammatical tags, inflectional paradigms, frequency mark-up, usage, specific field domains are, with the exception of MG prod-ucts, not offered in the EDs under study. In conclusion, none of the above mentioned EDs cover the needs of the Greek learner 100%.

3.4. The microstructure of the verb in two on-line EDs

Studying the search results for the verb in the two most compre-hensive on-line electronic dictionaries GEORGAKAS10 and MAGENTA11 the following remarks are to be made:

The former follows the microstructure of a Greek monolingual diction-ary12 providing a phonetic transcription for the Greek headword [an’ o] and including the etymological information at the end. However, it fails to do the same for the English equivalents nor does it provide any inflected forms for either SL or TL. It distinguishes 11 senses of the verb based on its transitive--intransitive structure and 3 senses as intransitive alone. The metalanguage is English and the grammatical information is given in semi-abbreviated forms (trans., intr.) but the coding is rather confusing for the user: e.g. (intr act. & mediop and ). It provides synonyms in the SL (Greek) and is clearly corpus-based. This is obvious in the citations / quotes of famous words of literature, provided unedited and unabridged and accompanied by the name of the author.13 The microstructure of the lemma is apparently de-signed for both receptive and productive use by a non-native speaker of

10 http://www.komvos.edu.gr/dictionaries/dictonline/DictOnLineGeo.htm

11 http://www.in.gr/dictionary/lookup.asp?Word

12 : . . (1998) : : http://www.komvos.edu.gr/

dictionaries/dictonline/DictOnLineTri.htm

13 from : (8) cause sth to acquire leaves or flowers poem ‘ ’ (Palam) | intr grow leaves or petals, be in flower, blossom (syn

or ). ’ | | folks. ‘ M (Theros) | poem , , |

(Valaor)

254 Mary Marin

Greek. To this end, it is extremely comprehensive in terms of lexical content albeit no syntactic information except transitivity/intransitivity marker is given, and this is one of its major differences with all the other electronic dictionaries. Nevertheless, its density does not make up for versatility as the learner has to read his/her way through the right equivalent. Therefore, user--friendliness is compromised and this affects overall performance and flexi-bility options. The user cannot navigate through the lemma, unless he/she reads it in detail, and the query possibilities are confined to canonical forms, that is, the search option does not rec gnize inflected forms of the verb such as (we opened) nor multi-word expressions. It is targeted at edu-cated adults and is hardly appropriate for students.

On the other hand, Magenta is supposedly designed to be ‘user--friendly’: The instructions are in Greek and by pressing the appropriate keystroke, the application asks for the key-word and gives the corresponding translations. (Figure 3) The search for came up with no less than 84 phrases with their translational equivalent. Unfortunately, the application cannot produce more than 10 expressions / one page of results at the time, alphabetically listed, nor does it display a pop-up list with all the possible prompts; therefore, the user has to renew the page 9 times to reach the last set of expressions. This method, despite its speed, is rather user-unfriendly and unreliable, taking into account the fact that all 84 ‘solutions’ are accom-panied by a cross-reference to another headword. In addition there are equivalents that are just cited without any mention of collocator (e.g:

(open more) = (See also): dilate). Finally, neither grammatical / syntactic information nor any examples are given anywhere in the dictionary.

It is obvious that electronic lexicography in Greece leaves much to be desired and significant improvements have to be made mainly in terms of the organisation of the lemmas, enhancement of the definitions and enrichment of examples in order to maximize lexical coverage and grammatical infor-mation. This can be accomplished initially through careful research in the corpora and the compilation of well-informed databases.

3.5. Compilation of the bilingual database

The first methodological step towards this end was the collection of ex-amples from both languages. The inter-related, inter-compatible examples were compared and contrasted to create rich Greek-English databases par-ticularly sensitive to the degrees of equivalence between the two languages. The databases were empirically motivated as they were corpus-driven; Cor-pus-enquiry software, “operating on large volumes of data, is very efficient at revealing the regular features of a language” (Rundell, 2008). First, in-stances of usage and collocational restrictions were observed in Word sketch, senses were identified in concordance lines (Figure 4) retrieved from


the (HNC) “Hellenic National Corpus” and the (BNC) “British National Corpus”14 for Modern Greek and English respectively, in order not only to identify the meaning of each headword, but also to determine its combina-tional behaviour: phraseology, patterns of complementation, collocational and contextual preferences, and all data were saved in two different files, one for each language, to inform the bilingual databases.

Parts of the database entries were selected to exemplify the templates and build the entry for the proposed electronic learners’ dictionary.

Figure 3: Search results for the entry in the on-line version of MAGENTA

14 British National Corpus (BNC). (2008). <http://www.sketchengine.co.uk/auth/corpora/

run.cgi/first_form?corpname=preloaded/bn Hellenic National Corpus (HNC). 2008. <http://hnc.ilsp.gr> GkWAC:http://beta.sketchengine.co.uk/auth/corpora/run.cgi/first_form ?corpname=preoaded/gkwac

256 Mary Marin

Corpus: GkWaC

Hits: 34386

aw ord,[w ord="(? =doc.id

. UNSEAL

20 . 4.

( 7). DRAW

.

TURN ON

.

SPREAD

Oxford Credit ( UK ) PLC “ 1997

OPEN A STORE

/ START A BUSINESS

. 1997,

OPEN AN ACCOUNT

. </p>

.

</p><p> fou-lianna

blogame START

DIG UP A HOLE

,

. OPEN BORDER

SAIL

Lexical Computing Ltd.

Sketch Engine (ver:SkE-2.31-2.59.3)

Figure 4: First page of Concordances from Sketch Engine results for

The theoretical frameworks that informed the databases were frame se-

mantics (Fillmore, 1985; Fillmore & Atkins, 1992), cognitive semantics (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980), as well as the contextual theory of meaning and corpus linguistics (Firth, 1957; Sinclair, 1991, 2003).

More specifically, in order to ascertain that all corpus data were system-atically and objectively analysed and that all relevant features of the head-word were included in the database, the Frame Semantics approach was ap-plied. Drawing on Atkins (1996), Atkins and Rundell (2008) and Mel’ uk’s (1998) theory of lexical functions and collocational patterns, first, the frame was defined, and its ‘core’ elements were named and described. Then, a list of all the words that evoke that frame in one of their senses was made. Next, for each sense or LU (Lexical Unit) a set of corpus sentences was extracted, each sentence was annotated by marking off its FE (Frame Elements) and for


each frame the phrase types (NP, PP, VP) and its grammatical functions (subject, object, complements, etc.).

An invaluable contribution towards the semantic analysis of each verb including their metaphorical and idiomatic instances proved to be the Cogni-tive semantics approach (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980), which by adopting the position that the conventional meanings associated with words and other linguistic units are seen as relating to thoughts and ideas, therefore semantic structure is conceptual structure, allowed for cross-linguistic comparisons.

Next, a style Guide was designed to ensure proportioned coverage of lexical and grammatical information in the combined bilingual database. Examples were collected for each LU (lexical unit) and translated or paral-leled with their English equivalents. (Figure 5)

Figure 5: Extract from the bilingual database for the verb

3.5. Editing the entry

One important consideration in dictionary-making has been that of space. While space is scarce in print lexicons, it is an abundant resource in online ones. This is because digital storage media are extremely efficient for storing immense amounts of text information. It has to be remembered that the aim of an electronic lexicon is different from that of printed dictionaries.

258 Mary Marin

The entries of an electronic lexicon, for example, should comfortably con-tain all orthographical or inflectional variations. There is abundant space for example sentences and usage notes. In addition, as Chon (2008) observes, users of electronic dictionaries no longer have problems with alphabetic search (Koren, 1997; Scholfield, 1982) which is a prerequisite for use of print-type dictionaries, or with dictionary metalanguage, e.g. for syntactic pattern and grammar codes, or abbreviations and acronyms. (cf. Neubach and Cohen, 1988; Tomaszczyk, 1979)

Furthermore, the grammatical categories of the source-language vocabulary

and its corresponding translations should be consistent. To this end, a template verb entry and the dictionary Style Guide were subsequently designed.

4. Model Entry for

As one can observe in the suggested model entry (Figures 6a & 6b) the target language (English) equivalents are given for headwords, derived forms and examples, and the metalanguage is L1 (Greek).15

Pronunciation is not transcribed but the user can hear the canonical form (in-

finitive) of each equivalent by pressing the icon ( ) next to the word.

Figure 6a: First page of Model Entry for

15 “With a monolingual, the student is forced to use the foreign language in order to under-

stand it, and there is of course no guarantee that the definitions, examples (glossed or un-glossed) or metalanguage notes are comprehensible. In the case of a bilingual, however, […] the student uses L1 in order to understand L2” (Atkins 2002: 21)


Senses are highlighted, marked by numbers (1, 2, 3…) discriminated not alphabetically but by collocational restrictions, and information about combinational properties is illustrated by examples of usage. Online versions of print dictionaries no longer have any compelling reason to use abbrevia-tions. In this model of electronic entry, no abbreviations have been used.

Grammar: All verbs are marked for transitivity ( /

). If a verb pattern is found more frequently in the Passive Voice, the equivalent is labelled ( /

).

The hand symbol ( ) refers the user to a second column on the right, where more information on verb structure is given highlighted. The presence of a second column means that information that is implicit in standard dic-tionaries can be made explicit for the learner. Derivatives are also provided.

In a user-friendly online lexicon it would be useful to offer a more ex-panded sample of the inflection of the translational equivalents. Verb basic forms (infinitive, 3rd person Present, present participle, Past Tense, Past Participle) are given for all verbs (both regular and irregular)

Translational equivalents are given for every sense in bold letters. If there is a multiple meaning of some entry words, partial equivalents of the target language should be given.

Usage notes are used consistently throughout the entries. They provide insightful guidance on confusing pairs of words and appear either in a sepa-rate box or in different colour in the right column.

Significant collocates are highlighted and modifiers are given next to the verb in the extra column. If problems in use arise for the user, there are cross references to an extra usage notes box, which pops up by clicking on the icon.

The example sentences are designed to emphasize points relating to the headword equivalent which students need to understand and learn. They are authentic and corpus-based aiming above all to generate a translation that shows the headword equivalent in action. It is useful to give more example sentences than are common in print dictionaries. Therefore, more examples can be retrieved by clicking on a computer icon.

The style/register level of equivalents should be the same in both lan-guages. Formal and informal uses are marked ( ) and ( ) or ( ) respectively, while figurative meaning is marked (META ).

The usage notes are inserted in boxes with a ( minimization maximi-zation close function), cross referred to from words or example sentences by clicking on a box icon. Occasional illustrations (pictures and photo-graphs) accompany some of the senses.

260 Mary Marin

Figure 6b: Third page of Model Entry for

5. Conclusions

Taking into account the target user’s needs and skills and in the light of the new possibilities offered by the electronic medium – namely the absence of space constraints, I believe that the entries should contain all inflectional variations, collocational restrictions, be accompanied by a sufficient number of illustrative corpus-based examples and grammatical indications to show the entry word’s paradigm in an explicit and detailed way. To this end, usage notes are deemed an essential component of the microstructure. Furthermore, the grammatical categories of the source-language vocabulary and its corre-sponding translations should be consistent.

Subsequent research could have a focus similar to this one by examin-ing the cases that fell outside the scope of the present study. It would there-fore be interesting to replicate this study, not only by testing the informed database with the initial group of students or to expand the present research for a larger number of verbs, or groups of verbs sharing common features, such as verbs of motion, perception and cognition as well as nouns and ad-jectives. In addition, the entries could be designed to cater for other target groups, such as primary school pupils or adult students with academic needs.

The implication of the study is that the constructed databases and their methodological design can serve as a model for the development of an ex-


tended bilingual lexical resource for the language pair Greek – English, to be used (and reused) by lexicographers writing various types of dictionaries.

In conclusion, facing all the work that remains to be done in order to in-form more bilingual databases, to configure the templates for the dictionary, eventually design a greater number of model entries, complete with usage notes, and perhaps, ultimately, implementing all the suggested interface fea-tures into a marketable electronic product, I consider thorough research and practical utilization of corpora of decisive importance. Feedback from the users as well as cooperation between information technology experts and lexicographers may lead to the improvement of existing e-dictionaries or the design of an effective ED for learners, catering not only for their encoding needs, as suggested in this study, but also for their decoding ones.

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on the lexicographic treatment of polysemous verbs...

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